Shared Fandom:

For those of you who don’t know, The Silmarillion is a book that explores the world of Lord Of The Rings even further.

In his Silmarillion Project, Aaron Diaz aims to create an illustration for every single chapter in the (ginormous) book.

…but his personal motivations go much deeper as this excerpt from his Tumblr explains:

“My motivation is to create a Middle-Earth visually unique from the style of the Peter Jackson films. I like the movies, but I miss the days when there was more diversity and interpretation to Tolkien illustrations.

A second motivation is to provide a greater representation of women and people of color in the narratives. While Tolkien made more than a few missteps regarding race and gender, the “everyone is white” trend in adaptations is a symptom of other people ignoring what’s in the texts.”

Aaron doesn’t mention money as a motivator but if The Silmarillion (the original) is in the public domain, the most natural way to generate revenue from this project would be to self-publish an illustrated version of the book. (A digital tablet version could be even more profitable.)

If The Silmarillion is not in the public domain, Aaron could package the art and pitch the idea to the publisher.

He also might be able to get away with publishing the art-only as a “tribute” book but I don’t know what the legal ins and outs of that would be…

If he wants to move the site off of Tumblr and over to a site he can control, he could generate revenue from all of the advertising and referral methods I listed at the beginning of this post.

Again, the more popular the project becomes, the more revenue it will generate.

Lessons From The Silmarillion Project:

Your dissatisfaction with the status quo might be the key.

There are lots of great stories in the public domain

When Hollywood fails to deliver, why not show them how it’s done?

You can often build a fan base faster if you borrow one.

The Opportunities Are Inspiring:

Something I love about The Geek-Out is the infinite flexibility.

Geek-outs also have the potential to grow so big that they collapse under their own weight (gotta look out for that).

You can revel in childlike silliness like Ethan and Malachai did with Axe Cop.

You can rebuild a world like Aaron Diaz did with The Silmarillion Project.

My Two Great Drives:

The first is learning. I love research, I love finding out about stuff, and knowing the seemingly trivial data points that add up to explain why things are the way they are.

When I bought my iPad One, I started collecting jpgs of artists I admired…

Now I have over 25,000 in my photo library.

For me, artists are like pro sports players, and the images of their work are like stats on baseball cards.

I can name the creators of 95% of those pictures just by looking at them. (Told you I’m a geek!)

My second drive is sharing. Finding a cool artist is awesome. SHOWING MY FRIENDS that artist makes my day. If I’m excited about something, I want as many people as possible to share that excitement and thrill.

Painting by Seth Rutledge

My Project:

These two personality traits both need to be fed fairly constantly for me to be a happy person.

As Chris has said, when you have things you NEED to do to feel complete, it’s good to think about how you can make a personal project out of them!

For a whole year, every day I will pick an artist, write a little bit about them and post pictures of their work on my blog.

It forces me to think about the things I love, prioritize them, and put them out for the world to see.

Avoiding Overwhelm:

Before I started, I thought about how I was going to set this project up, and what some of the challenges would be.

First off, I decided to not organize my posts in any way.

I like to surprise myself and allow for my tastes to change, so each day I would try to pick an artist without worrying about how they fit into the project as a whole.

Some would be living, some dead, and from all genres that I found appealing.

What you’re getting is a direct feed into my head, which can be a complex place!

Second, it has a definite start and end.

I reserve the right to extend it past one year, but this is not an endless death-march where I’ll never know when it’s finished.

It’s really important to have a grasp of the scope of any project you dive into.

What Is The Prize?

I also thought a bit about what I hoped to “gain” from doing this.

Obviously, my passion project would be pretty hard to monetize, but it has to help me somehow.

As I mentioned, I get to exercise both my desires to research and to share.

I’m hoping it will help crystallize my vast array of influences into something meaningful.

I’d love to increase my presence on the web.

It would be really cool to make contact with some of these artists in real life!

What Are The Challenges?

Besides the positive, if you’re going to undertake a long-term project you actually want to complete, it’s a good idea to think of the challenges you will face.

Do I know enough artists to fill a year?

How am I going to manage a daily post with my already busy life?

Is anyone going to care, or am I going to be speaking into the void?

If people DO read, are they going to think my choices (and hence me) are stupid?

As challenges go, these aren’t too bad!

I certainly know 365 artists I respect enough to share their work, and I’m learning of new ones all the time.

Posts don’t take that long to do, and if I am ever in a bind, there are utilities that let you pre-schedule blog posts for timed release, so if I know I’m going to camping in the outback for a week, I can write the necessary posts in advance.

Is Anyone Going To Care?

Well, I posted on my twitter of my intent to do this project in December, and the response was positive.

Even if only 20 people are reading at the outset, I decided that was enough, and the hope is that my numbers will increase throughout the year.

Am I Going To Look Stupid?

This is a tough one.

You gotta have a little faith in yourself, and remember that most people respond very positively to honest, heartfelt passion.

I’m sure there will be readers who don’t like the artists I post, but if that happens a lot, they’ll just stop reading. The problem in that case is not with me!

You should never be ashamed to pursue the things you love, they are what make you, well, YOU.

How’s It Going So Far?

I am very happy to report that less than two weeks into this project, my readership is increasing, I have made contact with several of the artists I’ve posted, and I’ve been given a number of new people to check out that I might not have otherwise heard of.

Best of all, I’m having fun doing it.

YOLO shouldn’t mean “be an idiot”, but hey, if I’m going to do something on my own, the first and most important measure of success should be how happy it makes me!

Thanks For Reading!

Obviously, there are many kinds of passion projects, and many different ways to approach “success” I hope this has been a helpful (or at least interesting) insight into one of those ways.

Reader Interactions

Comments

Great post Chris. I recently started working on my own ‘geek-out’ project. It’s about sumo wrestling. I hesitated at first – ‘who would read/look at this?’ ‘This is stupid’ ‘no one would be interested’ and so on.

But I started it anyway and I’m so glad I did! It’s not going to make any money, and some people might think its a bit dumb. But I’m doing it because I love sumo and I like totally geeking out about it. It’s completely different from my commercial work and it’s fun!

I’ve been a reader and listener for a long time but this is my first comment. Thanks for all your hard work!

The examples are good, Chris – but you may want to mention that both Ethan Nicolle and Aaron Diaz have built-in audiences already since they had been producing webcomics for a while prior to their geek-out projects. That built-in audience is a good argument for using leverage for exposure!

I don’t remember when I first came across Axe Cop, but to me it’s impact goes far deeper than the surface silliness. Yes, Ethan has done a superb job of interpreting the rambling imagination of a 5 year old boy. But the project isn’t about honing his illustrative or visual storytelling skills. It’s about loving on his little brother, and bringing him into his world. My own brother is amazingly creative, gifted beyond reason in both image and story. He is 13, and is completely driven by the idea of becoming a concept artist and creature designer. I am trying to encourage him in every way possible, yet my instincts tell me that he is aiming WAY LOW. The kid has the makings of a Tim Burton, a Neil Gaiman, a Glenn Keene, and very likely much, much more. He faces many challenges on his road, his Aspergers being foremost, but he will always have one man on the sidelines, with complete confidence in his incredible trajectory. This is why someone taking such obvious pride in his brother touches me so deeply.

All good points. I think it’s Seth Godin who says “Projects are the new resume.” If for nothing else, when you share your love of something with the Universe, you’ll be rewarded in some way. It may not be financial. It may be just upping your page views, but I think passion projects are a great way of showing who you as an artist really are.

I am loving this series. It’s a huge motivation to me to just keep working on my personal project and not worry if people will think its dumb or if it will make any money.
After all I don’t think anyone becomes an artist to get rich. I think being an artist is more of a ,have to because it’s part of you sort of thing. Thanks ,I love this blog it’s always so uplifting

Great post! I been doing mini geek out projects this month since my main graphic design work was delayed till next month. Mainly to test out new techniques and such I been looking up to dip into digital painting and illustration since I got the software.

For Seth, I hope he enjoys his project all the way through. I, myself, love researching and finding out about new things.

Thanks Mandy 🙂 I’m having a blast, currently trying to decide if I should shower the world with the awesomeness of some of my artist friends I met here in Vancouver, or if I should wait a bit until the blog gets a bit more mature…We shall see 🙂

Great work Seth and Chris- I loved this, and the previous post as well! I’ve been really impressed with all the artists that I’ve seen jumping out and creating their own personal work/brands outside of their day jobs as well… Things like Extra Cirricular Activities and my friend from LAIKA Josh Holtsclaw just set one up with his wife called Big Friend Co. It’s really inspiring seeing people immerse themselves into their craft! I’m looking forward to the rest of the parts to this topic!!

I think we’re often surprised at how many people share our geekdom. I’ve always considered myself an illustrator, but a little less than a year ago, I bought some clay and started making turtles. Lots and lots of turtles. Why turtles? Because I like them. At the time, I had no idea how many other people would like them too.

The geeky mash-ups soon followed. Now I was making Harry Potter turtles, Star Wars turtles, Legend of Zelda turtles, and so on. And all of the sudden, people wanted to buy them! I opened up an Etsy shop. At first, I was only making enough money to cover the cost of supplies, and yet, I couldn’t have been more thrilled with my success. Now, several months later, there are times when I can barely keep up with orders. Making money was never one of my goals when I started sculpting (and it still isn’t), but it’s been a welcome bonus, considering I would have made geeky clay turtles anyway, even if nobody else liked them.

Seth, as soon as Chris posted about your project I jumped into my rss reader and subscribed. I to am obsessed with seeing the work of other amazing artists, living or dead. So far your posts have resulted in every children’s book(my chosen field) that Colin Stimpson has illustrated being added to my amazon wish list!

wow, these series of articles could not come at a better time. I have been thinking of doing a personal project for a long while now, my project would follow under the geek-out, and it is very similar to the lord of the rings project. meaning I’m going from a story or fan base that already exists, just a different take on it, but my biggest problem is not the money or audience factor, but if it even legal to do what I want to do. I don’t think the characters from the franchise are in public domain and the original creator is still alive, so I don’t want to feel like I’m taking away the creator’s bread and butter so to speak or get into a illegal copyright fight over something that is might just for fun. I do know you can take copyrighted characters as long as you don’t gain any profit from it, ( I doubt my project will make any money anyway), but still it wouldn’t hurt if it did. do you have any advice on this? should a good ahead through with it despite my worries?

I also love this serie, Chris, It came at a right time for me.
About 6 months ago, I started on a personal project in the form of a children graphic novel, about little knotties getting themselves into unexpected situations and funny consequences.
I’m not in it for the money, so the pressure is off. My prize is to have the children enjoy the story, while identifying with the characters
As Seth said” best of all I’m having fun doing it”
I know how overwhelming this project can be. So this year I’m making my business of learn as much as possible, and begin with what I’ve learned so far.
So seeing so many people, talking about their personal project is very encouraging to me, as I don’t feel so isolated.

Another awesome article that has gotten ideas churning in my head. Now the tough part is choosing a topic and sticking with it, haha! I always felt bad working on personal projects, to be honest, since I always assumed only well established artists would have time for that. But hey, if your geek-out project can be added to your resume, why not do it? Now I must think of a catchy name for my project…

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